Luck Of The Draw

As the days passed and the toll in terms of lives lost and property damaged has risen as a result of the series of typhoons that has hit Metro Manila and much of northern Luzon, the residents of Lianga and its surrounding communities have tried to keep up with the latest news and developments in the unfolding tragedy of what is fast becoming one of the worst series of natural calamities to hit this country in recent memory. Taking in what many of them are saying about the disastrous events happening in the north has, inadvertently, become my avocation the past week or so.

"It's the wrath of God," asserts B., a senior member of the Catholic laity. "He has seen our wickedness and has sent in the waters to cleanse the world of evil." "Mark my words," he added with one finger wagging in the air. "It's the bitter lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah once again." His pronouncements, to my surprise, caused some listeners to nod their heads in agreement.

I wondered, knowing the man personally, if he would be brave enough to say the same words aloud in front of the hundreds of families in Metro Manila and Rizal, for example, who had lost not only their homes and valuables but more importantly many of their loved ones in the rampaging floods just a week or so ago. Perhaps it was the fact that he knows that his close relatives in the nation's capital are all safe and unaffected by the onslaught of Ondoy and Peping that has given him the courage and the temerity to be so callously judgmental about the suffering of a multitude of others.

B., a more compassionate colleague, is more circumspect. "We need to pray to the Lord more," he interjects. "We need to pray for faith and strength in these times of trials and challenges. Surely, God in his infinite mercy will come to our aid if we, His children, ask for His help and deliverance."

Wind Struck

If there is one ailment that always gets the goat of anyone minding my mother's small drugstore in Lianga, the dreaded "panuhot" is definitely at the top of the list.

"Can you please recommend to me a medicine for panuhot?," asks one elderly woman just the other day. She had one of those tattered, wide-brimmed buli hats that marked her as coming from one of the town's more remote, farming villages.

The sales clerk shrugged, suppressed a sigh of exasperation and headed immediately for the section displaying painkillers and muscle relaxants. It's the only thing she can do and has, in fact, been instructed to do. For in the whole of modern Western pharmacopoeia, there is no specific drug cure for a disorder that, as far as modern medicine is concerned, does not officially exist.

The panuhot is considered, in the traditional belief systems of the rural folk, to be the primary cause of a wide variety of symptoms which may include muscular aches and pains, swelling of the affected areas and sometimes fever, general body weakness and malaise. It is explained by practitioners of folk medicine as the negative effects of the entrance of hangin or wind and cold temperatures or bugnaw into specific body tissues or nerves where it accumulates and causes pain and discomfort.

The concept of the panuhot is intrinsically connected to the idea of the piang which like the latter has been known to bedevil rural doctors who have tried to disabuse the rural folk of such persistent traditional beliefs in favor of modern advances in scientific and medical knowledge. The piang (as differentiated from actual bone and skeletal fractures) refers to a supposed "fracture or dislocation" (whatever that means) in body tissues or nerves particularly in the back and chest area and is often cited by rural mothers as the main cause of coughing and other respiratory ailments in their children.

Moths To The Flame

When national television began broadcasting news reports and videos of the massive floods Typhoon Ondoy was causing in Metro Manila and its neighboring provinces last Saturday afternoon and evening, Lianga residents, like their fellow countrymen in the Visayas and the other parts of Mindanao, were caught by surprise and simply aghast at the scenes of wanton destruction and human suffering depicted live and in full color on their television screens.

The genuine outpouring of local sympathy and empathy for the victims of Ondoy's wrath was a consequence not only of the obvious fact that fellow Filipinos were at peril and in harm's way in the north of the country. There is also a more selfish and practical reason.

Lianga, despite the often insular and provincial outlook of its residents, is in reality a rather "cosmopolitan" town. When I borrow that term I generously use it to refer to the fact that there is nary a house or home here that has no immediate member of the family or, at the very least, a close relative who is either studying, living or working elsewhere in the country or outside of it. Metro Manila and its environs happens to be where most of the town's diaspora initially go and where, in most cases, ultimately end up.

It is a town that sadly reflects the national reality, where the restless and productive young are driven, like the proverbial lemmings of Norway facing population and food supply pressures, to leave their homes en masse and seek social advancement or economic and financial security somewhere else. To them Lianga is a dead end, a tropical paradise maybe for the young and the elderly but a stultifying prison for those eager to break free and make their own mark on life.

In With The New

They tore down the old public market building several weeks ago. Local town officials have said that the old building was already too dilapidated and had become structurally unsafe. Not only was it an eyesore already, it had become a public hazard and a veritable firetrap. In truth, it had been all of that for years and it is only now that the town government had finally the means and the will to tear what used to be one of Lianga's iconic landmarks.

In its place will soon rise a modern, multimillion peso, two story concrete building complex that will house not only the new public market and a bus and jeepney terminal but also spaces for commercial and business establishments. Funded by a local government loan, it will be the first major public building project this municipality will have undertaken in almost a decade.

The old public market was constructed in the 1960's. Wood which was plentiful and cheap during the heyday of the local logging industry was chiefly used for most of the structure. The architecture was simple, intuitive and nondescript as was common in the public buildings and even the private homes of that time. More like wooden boxes with corrugated metal sheets for roofing stacked and stringed together in a single line. This was, after all, before ergonomics and modern practical building design had became the norm.

The long, rectangular building with the market in the middle and two adjacent wings on each side used to house a helter-skelter collection of sea food restaurants, general merchandise stores and shops selling fishing and agricultural supplies. It had already, even during its early days, a weathered and ancient look, as if the relentless tropical sun and the constant lashing of the salty sea breezes had scraped and stripped off quickly the original protective paint layers and had prematurely aged then darkened and wrinkled its exposed, delicate wooden skin.

Where Credit Is Due

I was more than a bit bemused by the lively exchange of comments this blog got from readers to the blog post titled "Tangible Progress" wherein I described the positive impact the on-going road modernization program being implemented by the national government in the Lianga area is having on the daily lives of the residents of that town.

What struck me as significant is that much of the discussion (or contention, if you will) in the comments section has focused not on the real or "tangible" effects the massive road infrastructure program will have on the communities that will benefit from it but on the question of who should get the credit for getting the program funded and started in the first place. One should be thinking that if the person (or persons) who are indeed responsible for convincing the national government to bankroll and implement this much needed and anticipated project really deserves recognition for his (or their) efforts, then he (or they) would have no need to crow about it or advertise the fact. The facts (and such facts are always difficult to hide nowadays) would always speak for themselves.

Does Congressman Philip Pichay deserve all the credit for the concrete roads and bridges that will soon connect many of the municipalities of Surigao del Sur, Lianga most of all, whose infamous dirt roads and rickety, wooden bridges used to bedevil and haunt would be travelers in the Caraga region until recently? It happened, after all, during his watch, didn't it?

By the way, the rehabilitation and concreting of the roads particularly around Lianga is part of a larger package of road and highway modernization projects covering much of what is referred to as the Surigao-Davao coastal road system. As such, it would have been impossible not to include Lianga in the program since the national highway does go through the town and, thus, to exclude Lianga for any reason would have essentially emasculated a vital transportation artery that services the entire province of Surigao del Sur and the Caraga region.

Lianga's Port To Nowhere

Some four kilometers southwest of Lianga and right smack in the middle of a long stretch of desolate yet scenic coastline lies a wide expanse of flat and compacted dirt totally enclosed by a perimeter concrete fence. From what was once a rocky seashore, a long, massive, L-shaped concrete pier reaches into deep water like a beckoning finger at the far horizon.

The whole thing, more than P30 million pesos worth of construction (if my figures are right), is what is supposed to be the much anticipated port of Lianga and one of the major infrastructure projects on which the town is hoping to anchor its bid to become one of the more economically progressive municipalities in eastern Mindanao. That is, if someone can figure out what to do with it now that its has been supposedly completed and ready for use.

Until almost the last quarter of the last century, Lianga had always been a major transportation and trading hub in this part of the country. It was a coastal town with excellent harbor facilities for the small, wooden ships of that time and in the absence of an existing road network (which only came into existence in the 1960's), the brisk trade in copra, abacca fiber and rice was done by sea. The intrepid ships and boats of that bygone era carried people and cargo all over eastern Mindanao to as far as the Visayas.

Despite the boom in the local logging industry during the 1950's and 60's, the inter-island shipping industry shifted their attention to the emerging seaport of Nasipit in Agusan del Norte, and the more modern harbors of the cities of Cagayan de Oro in the west, Surigao in the north and Panabo and Davao City in the south. The ships finally stopped coming to Lianga and its small port languished then fell apart from disrepair. By the time I was a small boy in the 1970's, the old pier on the north of the town where the ships used to dock was already a ghostly ruin, a mass of broken and rotting timber noted only for the good fishing that can be had there.